Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon (bts book recommendations .txt) 📕

system was the end which determined the duration of the irregular

action. Of course it was possible that in some unexplained but purely

mechanical way the presence of many planetary girdles created the

explosion, or the fiery limb. Astronomical physics could suggest no

mechanism whatever which could have this result. Telepathic research was

now undertaken in order to test the theory of stellar consciousness, and

if possible to set up communication with the minded stars. This venture

was at first completely barren. The worlds had not the slightest

knowledge of the right method of approach to minds which, if they

existed at all, must be inconceivably different from their own. It

seemed all too probable that no factors in the mentality of the minded

worlds were sufficiently akin to the stellar mentality to form a means

of contact. Though the worlds used their imaginative powers as best they

might, though they explored, so to speak, every subterranean passage and

gallery of their own mentality, tapping everywhere in the hope of

answer, they received none. The theory of stellar purposefulness began

to seem incredible. Once more the worlds began to turn to the

consolation, nay the joy, of acceptance. Nevertheless, a few

world-systems that had specialized in psychological technique persisted

in their researches, confident that, if only they could communicate with

the stars, some kind of mutual understanding and concord could be

brought about between the two great orders of minds in the galaxy. At

long last the desired contact with the stellar minds was effected. It

came not through the unaided efforts of the minded worlds of our galaxy

but partly through the mediation of another galaxy where already the

worlds and the stars had begun to realize one another.

Even to the minds of fully awakened worlds the stellar mentality was

almost too alien to be conceived at all. To me, the little human

individual, all that is most distinctive in it is now quite

incomprehensible. Nevertheless, its simpler aspect I must now try to

summarize as best I may, since it is essential to my story. The minded

worlds made their first contact with the stars on the higher planes of

stellar experience, but I shall not follow the chronological order of

their discoveries. Instead I shall begin with aspects of the stellar

nature which were haltingly inferred only after intercourse of a sort

had become fairly well established. It is in terms of stellar biology

and physiology that the reader may most easily conceive something of the

mental life of stars.

3. STARS

Stars are best regarded as living organisms, but organisms which are

physiologically and psychologically of a very peculiar kind. The outer

and middle layers of a mature star apparently consist of “tissues” woven

of currents of incandescent gases. These gaseous tissues live and

maintain the stellar consciousness by intercepting part of the immense

flood of energy that wells from the congested and furiously active

interior of the star. The innermost of the vital layers must be a kind

of digestive apparatus which transmutes the crude radiation into forms

required for the maintenance of the star’s life. Outside this digestive

area lies some sort of coordinating layer, which may be thought of as

the star’s brain. The outermost layers, including the corona, respond to

the excessively faint stimuli of the star’s cosmical environment, to

light from neighboring stars, to cosmic rays, to the impact of meteors,

to tidal stresses caused by the gravitational influence of planets or of

other stars. These influences could not, of course, produce any clear

impression but for a strange tissue of gaseous sense organs, which

discriminate between them in respect of quality and direction, and

transmit information to the correlating “brain” layer.

The sense experience of a star, though so foreign to us, proved after

all fairly intelligible. It was not excessively difficult for us to

enter telepathically into the star’s perception of the gentle

titillations, strokings, pluckings, and scintillations that came to it

from the galactic environment. It was strange that, though the star’s

own body was actually in a state of extreme brilliance, none of this

outward-flowing light took effect upon its sense organs. Only the faint

incoming light of other stars was seen. This afforded the perception of

a surrounding heaven of flashing constellations, which were set not in

blackness but in blackness tinged with the humanly inconceivable color

of the cosmic rays. The stars themselves were seen colored according to

their style and age. But though the sense perception of the stars was

fairly intelligible to us, the motor side of stellar life was at first

quite incomprehensible. We had to accustom ourselves to an entirely new

way of regarding physical events. For the normal voluntary motor

activity of a star appears to be no other than the star’s normal

physical movement studied by our science, movement in relation to other

stars and the galaxy as a whole. A star must be thought of as vaguely

aware of the gravitational influence of the whole galaxy, and more

precisely aware of the “pull” of its near neighbors; though of course

their influence would generally be far too slight to be detected by

human instruments. To these influences the star responds by voluntary

movement, which to the astronomers of the little minded worlds seems

purely mechanical; but the star itself unquestioningly and rightly feels

this movement to be the freely willed expression of its own

psychological nature. Such at least was the almost incredible conclusion

forced on us by the research carried out by the Galactic Society of

Worlds.

Thus the normal experience of a star appears to consist in perception of

its cosmical environment, along with continuous voluntary changes within

its own body and in its position in relation to other stars. This change

of position consists, of course, in rotation and passage. The star’s

motor life is thus to be thought of almost as a life of dance, or of

figure-skating, executed with perfect skill according to an ideal

principle which emerges into consciousness from the depths of the

stellar nature and becomes clearer as the star’s mind matures.

This ideal principle cannot be conceived by men save as it is manifested

in practice as the well-known physical principle of “least action,” or

the pursuit of that course which in all the gravitational and other

conditions is the least extravagant. The star itself, by means of its

purchase on the electromagnetic field of the cosmos, apparently wills

and executes this ideal course with all the attention and delicacy of

response which a motorist exercises in threading his way through traffic

on a winding road, or a ballet-dancer in performing the most intricate

movements with the greatest economy of effort. Almost certainly, the

star’s whole physical behavior is normally experienced as a blissful, an

ecstatic, an ever successful pursuit of formal beauty. This the minded

worlds were able to discover through their own most formalistic

aesthetic experience. In fact it was through this experience that they

first made contact with stellar minds. But the actual perception of the

aesthetic (or religious?) rightness of the mysterious canon, which the

stars so earnestly accepted, remained far beyond the mental range of the

minded worlds. They had to take it, so to speak, on trust. Clearly this

aesthetic canon was in some way symbolical of some spiritual intuition

that remained occult to the minded worlds.

The life of the individual star is not only a life of physical movement.

It is also undoubtedly in some sense a cultural and a spiritual life. In

some manner each star is aware of its fellow stars as conscious beings.

This mutual awareness is probably intuitive and telepathic, though

presumably it is also constantly supported by inference from observation

of the behavior of others. From the psychological relations of star with

star sprang a whole world of social experiences which were so alien to

the minded worlds that almost nothing can be said of them.

There is perhaps some reason for believing that the free behavior of the

individual star is determined not only by the austere canons of the

dance but also by the social will to cooperate with others. Certainly

the relation between stars is perfectly social. It reminded me of the

relation between the performers in an orchestra, but an orchestra

composed of persons wholly intent on the common task. Possibly, but not

certainly, each star, executing its particular theme, is moved not only

by the pure aesthetic or religious motive but also by a will to afford

its partners every legitimate opportunity for self-expression. If so,

the life of each star is experienced not only as the perfect execution

of formal beauty but also as the perfect expression of love. It would,

however, be unwise to attribute affection and comradeship to the stars

in any human sense. The most that can safely be said, is that it would

probably be more false to deny them affection for one another than to

assert that they were, indeed, capable of love. Telepathic research

suggested that the experience of the stars was through and through of a

different texture from that of the minded worlds. Even to attribute to

them thought or desire of any kind is probably grossly anthropomorphic,

but it is impossible to speak of their experience in any other terms.

The mental life of a star is almost certainly a progress from an obscure

infantile mentality to the discriminate consciousness of maturity. All

stars, young and old, are mentally “angelic,” in that they all freely

and joyfully will the “good will,” the pattern of right action so far as

it is revealed to them; but the great tenuous young stars, though they

perfectly execute their part in the galactic dance, would seem to be in

some manner spiritually naive or childlike in comparison with their more

experienced elders. Thus, though there is normally no such thing as sin

among the stars, no deliberate choice of the course known to be wrong

for the sake of some end known to be irrelevant, there is ignorance, and

consequent aberration from the pattern of the ideal as revealed to stars

of somewhat maturer mentality. But this aberration on the part of the

young is itself apparently accepted by the most awakened class of the

stars as itself a desirable factor in the dance pattern of the galaxy.

From the point of view of natural science, as known to the minded

worlds, the behavior of young stars is of course always an exact

expression of their youthful nature; and the behavior of the elder stars

an expression of their nature. But, most surprisingly, the physical

nature of a star at any stage of its growth is in part an expression of

the telepathic influence of other stars. This fact can never be detected

by the pure physics of any epoch. Unwittingly scientists derive the

inductive physical laws of stellar evolution from data which are

themselves an expression not only of normal physical influences but also

of the unsuspected psychical influence of star on star.

In early ages of the cosmos the first “generation” of stars had been

obliged to find their way unhelped from infancy to maturity; but later

“generations” were in some manner guided by the experience of their

elders so that they should pass more quickly and more thoroughly from

the obscure to the fully lucid consciousness of themselves as spirits,

and of the spiritual universe in which they dwelt. Almost certainly, the

latest stars to condense out of the primeval nebula advanced (or will

advance) more rapidly than their elders had done; and throughout the

stellar host it was believed that in due season the youngest stars, when

they had attained maturity, would pass far beyond the loftiest spirit

insight of their seniors. There is good reason to say that the two

overmastering desires